Tuesday, November 10, 2009

If you haven't read Proust, don't worry. This lacuna in your cultural development you do not need to fill. On the other hand, if you have read all of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, you should be very worried about yourself. As Proust very well knew, reading his work for as long as it takes is temps perdu, time wasted, time that would be better spent visiting a demented relative, meditating, walking the dog or learning ancient Greek.

Seriously, I wish I had back the time I've spent reading Proust. And I never made it all the way through. I want to say to Proust what Ezra Pound said to Joyce, for somewhat different reasons, about Finnegans Wake: “Nothing, so far as I can make out, nothing short of divine vision or a new cure for the clap can possibly be worth all that circumambient peripherization.”

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Commentary on technologies of reading, writing, research, and, generally, knowledge. As these technologies change and develop, what do we lose, what do we gain, what is (fundamentally or trivially) altered? And, not least, what's fun?